PACE recognizes ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia
Last week, a mission of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) studied the history of the conflict in the Caucasus. Delegates visited Tbilisi and Tskhinvali and later shared their impressions at a press conference attended by local and Western journalists in the Georgian capital.
Head of the PACE mission Luke Van den Brande said he was shaken and even shocked by what he saw a ruined Tskhinvali and burned Ossetian and Georgian villages.
"There are no words to justify what happened," Van den Brande said. "However, we can’t refer to the events in Tskhinvali as a genocide. We need to be careful when using this word. What most probably went on was ethnic cleansing."
However, KP consulted several dictionaries and discovered that a genocide is nothing more than "a form of ethnic cleansing." As a result, it seems that there is no contradiction between the the two terms. Of course, it's possible that PACE doesn't trust Russian dictionaries. Everything will be clear after PACE's autumn session when Van den Brande introduces his official report.
At around the same time, the Museum of Russian Aggression will open in the Georgian town of Gori. Interestingly, the museum will be located on the second floor of the Stalin Museum. The Soviet leader certainly wouldn't have imagined such a thing possible. Experts from the Baltics and Poland will help the Georgians create the museum. And it's a well-known fact how cunningly these nations are able to bend history.
On this note, it should be mentioned that another museum has operated in Tbilisi for years now — the Museum of Soviet Occupation. It isn't especially popular among the mainstream population, but a mandatory stop for schoolchildren and Western journalists. The rumor goes that Saakashvili was behind the founding of the museum.
The icing on the cake, however, which sums up the issue quite well, was the UK Ambassador to Russia Tony Brenton’s remark yesterday openly terming Georgia's aggression against South Ossetia a "huge mistake."
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